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R-selected blame genes

Cheating is the opposite of pair bonding. If you can do it, there’s something wrong with you and the honest thing (they can’t be trusted in social relations either) would be to split up before straying.

If you’re a cheat, you aren’t monogamous. Monogamy is a bond. If the bond is broken, there is no relationship.

One minor correction: there is no evolutionary benefit for men cheating.
That is a myth. Based purely on pregnancy odds (actually rape leads to more conception, so that’s a dark path of naturalistic fallacies to argue), not the birth of a child or its own reproductive success (true success).

5 responses to “R-selected blame genes”

Looking at tribal societies, rape and rogue r-selected males are both the major drivers of genetic diversity in areas where inbreeding is preferred to mating with someone a single tribe over, as well as the most successful fathers. When warring tribes become so genetically isolated that populations a simple walk away present the most ethnically divergent features of any human populations, the guy who gets his genes into the next tribe over is protecting his offspring. When a mother is not alone to raise her child, but supported by local older women, young girls and betas, pair-bonded couples are not actually as advantageous. When the whole community raises every child, a strong tribe beats a strong family unit in the absence of the other. It’s an observable reality if you read up on the genetic and social patterns of African tribes and Australian Aborigenes.

You could always argue that we have progressed beyond that in that pair-bonded, consolidated couplings enable a much larger and therefore much stronger society to form. But you cannot deny that at one point in our development the r-selected patterns added something, because they still do to this day. Their success isn’t even in our distant evolutionary history: it’s a six hour flight away.